Best Genealogy Websites for Researching Irish Ancestors

FamilySearch

Irish civil registration indexes 1845 through 1958, plus parish records of births (baptisms), marriages and deaths have been transcribed by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and can be searched for free on their Web site at FamilySearch.org. Browse to "Ireland" from the "Search" page, and then search each database directly for best results.

A wealth of digitized records that have not yet been indexed are also available for free for portions of Ireland. Coverage is by no means complete, but it is a good place to start. Another search trick is to use Ireland IGI Batch Numbers to search the International Genealogical Index - see Using IGI Batch Numbers for a tutorial.

Free

FindMyPast

Subscription-based website FindMyPast.ie, a joint venture between Findmypast and Eneclann, offers over 2 billion Irish records, including some which are exclusive to the site such as Landed Estate Court Rentals with details on over 500,000 tenants residing on estates across Ireland, Irish Prison Registers featuring over 3.5 million names, Poverty Relief Loans, and Petty Session Order Books.

The 1939 Register is also available with a world subscription. Additional Irish genealogy records include the complete Griffith's Valuation, over 10 million searchable Catholic parish registers (the index can be searched for free without a subscription), millions of Irish directories and newspapers, plus military records, BMD indexes, census records, and almanacs.

Subscription, pay-per-view

National Archives of Ireland

The genealogy section of the National Archives of Ireland offers several free searchable databases, such as the Ireland-Australia Transportation Database, along with finding aids to many useful record series held in the National Archives. Of special interest is their digitization of Irish 1901 and 1911 census records which are complete and available online for free access.

Free

IrishGenealogy.ie - Civil Registers of Births, Marriages and Deaths

This website hosted by the Minister for Arts, Heritage, Regional, Rural and Gaeltacht Affairs is home to a variety of Irish records, but most especially serves as home to the historic registers and indexes to the Civil Registers of Births, Marriages, and Deaths.

RootsIreland: Irish Family History Foundation

The Irish Family History Foundation (IFHF) is a nonprofit coordinating body for a network of government approved genealogical research centers in the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. Together these research centers have computerized almost 18 million Irish ancestral records, primarily church records of baptisms, marriages, and burials, and made the indexes available online for free. To view a detailed record you can purchase credit online for instant access at a per-record cost.

Free index searches, pay to view detailed records

Ancestry.com - Irish Collection, 1824-1910

The Ireland subscription-based collection at Ancestry.com offers access to several important Irish collections, including Griffiths Valuation (1848-1864), Tithe Applotment Books (1823-1837), Ordnancy Survey Maps (1824-1846) and the Lawrence Collection of Irish Photographs (1870-1910). Subscription, plus Irish census, vital, military, and immigration records.

AncestryIreland

The Ulster Historical Foundation offers subscription-based access to more than 2 million genealogical records from Ulster, including birth, death, and marriage records; gravestone inscriptions; censuses; and street directories. Matheson's Distribution of Surnames in Ireland in 1890 is available as a free database. Most of the rest are available as pay-per-view. Select databases are only available to members of the Ulster Genealogical & Historical Guild.

Subscription, pay-per-view

Irish Newspaper Archives

A variety of newspapers from Ireland's past have been digitized, indexed and made available for searching online through this subscription-based site. Searching is free, with a cost for viewing/downloading the pages. The site currently features over 1.5 million pages of newspaper content, with another 2 million in the works from papers such as The Freeman's JournalIrish IndependentThe Anglo-CeltSubscription

Emerald Ancestors

This extensive Ulster genealogy database contains baptism, marriage, death, burial, and census records for over 1 million Irish ancestors in Counties Antrim, Armagh, Down, Fermanagh, Londonderry, and Tyrone. Most database results are indexes or partial transcriptions. Very few new records have been added in recent years, however.

Subscription

Failte Romhat

The personal Web site of John Hayes might not be the first place you'd expect to visit, but his site actually offers a surprising number of online Irish databases and transcribed documents, including Land Owners in Ireland 1876, Irish Flax Growers List 1796, Pigot & Co's Provincial Directory of Ireland 1824, cemetery transcriptions and photographs, and much more. Best of all, it is all free!

National Archives – Famine Irish Collection

The U.S. National Archives has two online databases of information on immigrants who came to America from Ireland during the Irish famine, covering the years 1846 to 1851. The "Famine Irish Passenger Record Data File" has 605,596 records of passengers arriving in New York, about 70% of whom came from Ireland. The second database, "List of Ships that Arrived at the Port of New York During the Irish Famine," gives background detail on the ships that brought them over, including the total number of passengers.

Fianna Guide to Irish Genealogy

In addition to excellent tutorials and guides for researching ancestry in Ireland Fianna also offers transcriptions from a variety of primary documents and records.

Free

Irish War Memorials

This beautiful site presents an inventory of war memorials in Ireland, along with inscriptions, photographs and other details of each memorial. You can browse by location or war, or search by surname.

"Missing Friends" Irish Advertisements in the Boston Pilot

This free collection from Boston College includes the names of approximately 100,000 Irish immigrants and their family members contained in nearly 40,000 "Missing Friends" advertisements which appeared in the Boston "Pilot" between October 1831 and October 1921. Details about each missing Irish immigrant may vary, including such items as the county and parish of their birth, when they left Ireland, the believed port of arrival in North America, their occupation, and a range of other personal information.

Free

Northern Ireland Will Calendars

The Public Record Office of Northern Ireland hosts a fully searchable index to the will calendar entries for the three District Probate Registries of Armagh, Belfast and Londonderry, covering the periods 1858-1919 and 1922-1943 and part of 1921. Digitized images of full will entries 1858-1900 are also available, with the rest to come.

The Irish Genealogist Names Index and Database

The Irish Genealogist (TIG), the journal of the Irish Genealogical Research Society (IGRS), has been published annually since 1937 with Irish family histories, pedigrees, leases, memorial inscriptions, deeds, newspaper extracts and transcripts of parish registers, voters lists, census substitutes, wills, letters, family bibles, rentals and militia & army rolls. IRGS's genealogy database allows you to search the free online names index to TIG (over a quarter of a million names). Scanned images of the journal’s articles are now being added and linked, with volume 10 of TIG now online (covering the years 1998–2001). Additional images will continue to be added.